Wednesday, November 02, 2016

If I Were a Rich Man

Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign is raising questions about the timing of the FBI’s release Tuesday of records on a 15-year-old investigation into President Bill Clinton’s pardon to fugitive financier Marc Rich.

The FBI posted the 129 pages of records in its online Freedom of Information Act reading room in apparent response to a FOIA request seeking information on FBI inquiries into the Clinton Foundation.

The timing is odd, for sure, but it's a useful reminder of who the Clintons are and how they operate. Rich was a fugitive from justice when the pardon came. The suspicion at the time was that Rich's wife, Denise, made donations to the Clintons in order to procure the pardon. More from the linked article:

Despite the lack of major revelations in the documents, which constitute only a part of the FBI’s files on the inquiry, the atmospherics in the records are unhelpful to the Clinton campaign. The records repeatedly refer to the probe being handled by the “Public Corruption Unit” and make clear that the FBI was examining claims that Denise Rich’s Democratic Party “donations may have been intended to influence the fugitive’s pardon.”

“It appears that the required pardon standards and procedures were not followed,” the internal FBI memos said.

We knew that at the time. Bill Clinton had the right to pardon Rich, so in the end the investigation didn't really go anywhere (fun fact: the official who closed the case was James Comey), but the stink of it has never really gone away. I would not be surprised if a few more blasts from the past are forthcoming. For the moment, this election seems to be more of a referendum on Clintonworld than it is about Trump. That's may change -- I imagine the Clintons have at least one more oppo dump for The Donald -- but as long as the focus remains on how the Clintons operate, it's going to be a problem for Hillary.